Flickr image 壞時代，好設計　By Pizza Cut Five (Nodi Chen)

Your career is still one of the most important ways to achieve financial freedom because it is how many of us generate income.

When you are first starting out in you career, the income your career brings helps you clear your study loans, pay for your expenses and generally allows you to save so as to be able to have sufficient money to invest for passive income.

Before the number of grey hairs on my head became more prominent, I believed that the path towards financial freedom is to work hard at your job and save money.

I was right for a while before it became apparent that working hard gets you only so far. I’m not saying working hard is not important because it is. But working hard but itself without applying the “smart” part sometimes result in you working for results that are unsatisfactory.

Why is that?

Working Hard

Working hard is important when you are first starting out. It is the main way for you to acquire skills and knowledge in the area you are working. When I first started out as an auditor, I worked hard in that most of the junior level audit checking, ticking, vouching, tracing to documents, asking client questions, digging through histories of transactions was part and parcel of my daily work.

Answering review points, and compiling neat working papers to substantiate balances and to document controls of the client’s system were everyday stuff that I did. It was like that for two years before I “graduated” to become a team leader managing other auditors.

Being a team leader, I worked hard as well, answering to my audit manager while getting my people to deliver on their portions of the audit assignment.

It was a necessary step for me to understand how audit worked and it was part of the price to pay for earning my Certified Public Accountant (non-practising) certification.

Working Smart

For your hard work to be recognised, you need to work smart. This means getting the people who decide your promotion, bonuses and overall career development to understand what you’ve done for the organisation. It means to network, to get to know people from all levels within the organisation as well as to be able to determine what type of projects and assignments get you climbing the career ladder and not stagnating over time.

I saw examples of people who were technically as competent or in some cases less so than me but who got ahead in terms of promotion or prospects because of their ability to network or connect with the bosses.

I also saw how if you met your key performance indicators, sometimes it didn’t really matter how you did it so long as no obvious rules were broken. This was clear during my stint in the private sector where the bottom line explained 95% of your performance and customer satisfaction was not as critical so long as the customer didn’t make a complaint to your bosses for your delivery.

Working Hard and Smart

Working hard and smart is the way to go. Work hard on things that MATTER. Things that matter are stuff that will get you promoted. Things that the organisation values. Things that make a contribution and can be seen.

The pareto principle or 80-20 rule teaches us to focus on things that matter. What are your targets and indicators. How can you achieve them in the most efficient manner?

Being a knowledge worker and internal auditor, my value is not in ploughing through 100 samples to test if controls are working but in first identifying whether the system or process is reasonably instituted from the start.

If the system is poorly designed from the controls perspective and fails to align its operators to the organisational goals, then there’s no point in going through the details when the big picture is flawed.

Working hard and smart requires one to first understand the context in which one operates. What’s important to this organisation. What are my goals and objectives within this context and how can I maximise my outputs and outcomes by leveraging on the most economical inputs?

By doing so, we leverage on our limited time to have a big, positive impact to the organisation and to push ourselves nearer to financial freedom from progressing in our careers.

Remember, developing your career to earn more money helps you become financially free IF you remember to save the additional income and keep lifestyle inflation at bay.

How do you work smart in your own environments?

Be well and prosper.